VMware ESXi on Microsoft Azure & Migration to Azure

I stumbled across this blog announcement the other day and found it quite enlightening.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/transforming-your-vmware-environment-with-microsoft-azure/

Basically, the first part of the blog post is all about a frictionless migration path from VMware to Azure – being available from 27th November 2017 – unfortunately no one really answers the question about whether this will finally allow a virtual machine configured with efi to be migrated to Azure… we’ll have to wait for that answer.

Further down the blog post is an interesting item:   ‘Host VMware infrastructure with VMware virtualization on Azure’ – this I find very interesting, although the licensing of it may prove to be interesting.

Here’s the text from that section:

• Host VMware infrastructure with VMware virtualization on Azure. Most workloads can be migrated to Azure easily using the above services; however, there may be specific VMware workloads that are initially more challenging to migrate to the cloud. For these workloads, you may need the option to run the VMware stack on Azure as an intermediate step. Today, we’re excited to announce the preview of VMware virtualization on Azure, a bare-metal solution that runs the full VMware stack on Azure hardware, co-located with other Azure services. We are delivering this offering in partnership with premier VMware-certified partners. General availability is expected in the coming year. Please contact your Microsoft sales representative if you’d like to participate in this preview.  Hosting the VMware stack in public cloud doesn’t offer the same cost savings and agility of using cloud-native services, but this option provides you additional flexibility on your path to Azure.